Cooking with Tam

 

Cooking is so much more fun with a friend, and for this recipe I’ve teamed up with my wonderful massage therapist, Tammy! Like many people I’ve met recently, she’d like to eat less meat, so I suggested I could share some of my favorite vegetable based meals with her, and we had a HOOT!

This week it was yummy Vegetable gratin & scrumptious Cauliflower buffalo wings. Here are the recipes and some snaps of our shenanigans!

VEGETABLE GRATIN

This recipe is SO easy – the hardest part is choosing your vegetables! We used leek, sweet potato, bulb fennel and parsnip, but you could easily use potato, carrot, onion, brussel sprouts, broccoli…the list goes on. Then –

1. Cut up all your veggies into pieces around 2cm.
2. Add about 1 cup of cream & 1 cup of tasty cheese – we used parmesan
3. Season with salt and pepper
4. Bake in a moderate oven (180 C) for about an hour or until the veggies are cooked to your liking.

   

A couple of times through the cooking process, take your dish out of the oven and turn the vegetables over to get a good cover of cream & cheese. Tammy was a great stirrer!

While the Gratin was cooking, Tam & I poured a wine and started making the Buffalo Wings. There are two distinct parts to making these –

1. Cut the cauliflower into little florets, cover in batter and roast them in the oven, turning them over in the middle of the cooking.
2. Cover the florets in sauce and send them back into the oven to cook more & absorb the sauce.

So here’s the recipe –

CAULIFLOWER BUFFALO WINGS

Batter

• 1 cup plain flour 
• 1 cup milk (any sort)
• spices – we used sweet paprika & cummin with salt & pepper

SAUCE

• 1 tablespoon of melted butter
• 1 cup prepared BBQ sauce 

1. Mix up the batter -it should be slightly runny but still stick to the cauliflower .
2. Cut up a whole cauliflower into small florets – these are the ‘wings’.
3. Cover the cauliflower wings completely in the batter and lay on baking paper on a baking tray.
4. Cook for 20 mins in a moderate oven (180 C).
5. Take out the tray and turn each floret over.
6. Put back in the oven for a further 15 mins
7. Meanwhile, make the sauce by adding the melted butter to the BBQ sauce. 
8. Take the tray of wings out and cover them thoroughly in the sauce 
9. Return the wings to the tray and cook in the oven for a further 20 mins

Tam and I used Sweet Baby Ray’s Buffalo Wing Sauce, that Tammy just happened to have in her cupboard – the perfect sauce for this recipe! BBQ sauce works well too.

All that was left was to taste the final result and plate up! 

These two dishes are wonderful vegetable additions to a meat meal if you don’t want to go the full vegetarian way. 

If you’re wanting a vegan option, use cashew cream & vegan cheese for the Vegetable gratin recipe and non-dairy milk for the batter and oil spread for the sauce in the Buffalo wings recipe.

Thanks Tam for your wonderful company, wine and of course, stirring!!

Happy cooking,

Amanda